Yesterday was the first day of Social Media Week, and it seems like things in London are off to a great start… Many events are already sold out, filled to capacity, and with waiting lists, which is always a good thing – clearly there’s a significant amount of interest in London when it comes to Social Media, and by the make up of attendees, it isn’t all just one big echo chamber of the same people talking about the same thing with each other, fortunately.
Unfortunately, I missed out on the lunchtime session on Social Graph Optimization, hosted at the IAB, sponsored by Meebo. Fortunately, Benjamin Ellis did a great writeup of the event, you can read it here.
Speaking to a few friends at the Social Media Week Launch event last night though, it seems people weren’t too impressed with the conversations around the Social Graph, and so I guess I didn’t miss out too much. Apparently it was more geared towards a corporate style audience. (If anyone happens to have any video of the talk though, I would love to see it. ;)
The other two events, I was particularly interested in yesterday were the Social Media Monday meetup, and the launch party for Social Media Week.
Social Media Monday is a meetup, organised by Barry Furby, the man behind Fresh Resources, a recruitment company, that works heavily in the Social Media Space. It started out from a LinkedIn Group, and then a Meetup Group was formed for Social Media Monday, with events starting shortly after. It’s grown into quite a strong, solid community of very diverse players in the Social Media space, and there seems to be some great presentations and speakers at these events, which makes for a good mix of learning, and socialising. I stopped in briefly at Social Media Monday, just as Todd Chaffee was setting up, and getting his laptop ready for the presentation later that evening.. (But as Barry had his HD Recorder, and was going to record the whole talk, I figured I wouldn’t miss too much, by not watching the presentation live, and promptly changed my RSVP for the meetup to a No, hoping it would make a bit of extra room for someone on the waiting list.)
As I tweeted out 
from Social Media Monday, I thought nothing of it. Later, I found out, that because of it, @champney who was at the Social Media Monday event, saw my tweet cascade down the Twitter Wall, and realised that the familiar faces he was expecting to see were probably also already at the other event. Like him I too had RSVP’d for both events, but ended up spending more time at the Social Media Launch event.
I love that about twitter. Sometimes you can never predict, or anticipate what might be useful to who, or when.. but just by being yourself, you naturally end up helping folk out. It’s that unpredictable, undefinable nature of Social Media, which can mean a single short message, somewhere can create a new context or help someone in a way that you could never imagine or think of when broadcasting.
Anyways, the feedback via twitter, is all really positive and praising of Social Media Monday, and Todd’s presentation, so I’m really looking forward to seeing the video from it ;)
As for the Social Media Launch Party, at Adam Street, it was also a great success. The room was packed to the hilt, at one point in the evening, and the noise from so many people talking, in a relatively small room meant there was a real buzz about the night. There were many familiar faces, and also many new faces, which is always good.
Of the many great conversations I had last night one that really stood out was about the change in blogging behaviour since the arrival of Twitter. Steve Lamb aka @actionlamb was talking about how a few years back, he would blog daily, and since using twitter, his level of blogging has dropped dramatically. This seems to have been a pattern that I noticed both myself, and also have seen with others. Even the great Robert Scoble admitted to a drop in his blogging as he spent more time on Twitter and FriendFeed, back in 2008. Since then, he’s clearly made the conscious choice to return to blogging. He did go change that around, and has since picked up his blog, though to be fair, the amount of content, and sharing that Robert Scoble does, generally dwarfs the efforts of most regular people.
But it did get us talking about what we get out of tweeting. I suggested that perhaps the amount of time that might have been spent in creating and sharing a single blog post, is now spread out across an entire day, in the many tweets being shared, and responded to. Though, the more I think about it, I’d probably say more time gets eaten up tweeting, than would have been the case if just blogging, as before, at least for me. I’d be curious to see if anyone else has noticed a change in their blogging behaviour since they’ve taken up twitter.. In theory being able to share through Twitter means you get to connect with more people, and also means it takes less effort, as a tweet is barely a minute’s worth of attention whilst a solid researched blog post of any decent quality can usually cost from an hour to as much as two or three hours of time. I’d be interested in hearing other people’s take on how their tweeting has changed their blogging behaviour if at all?
All in all, there were drinks, food, and even some food for thought.. a great night which definitely ended far later than I was intending to.
My night ended with me talking to Misae Richwoods on our train home, about Social Media and Spiral Dynamics, and using the different modalities and some basic premises of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming), to use dramatically different language to create discernably different results.. but I’ll be talking a whole lot more about that this year, so I shan’t bore with too much of that just yet ;)
